Interview stuffs
Jun. 10th, 2003 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikMy good friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
traveller_blues fell prey to the interview-meme. He passed it my way by request. I put off answering until the weekend was over.
1>You're going to be shipped off to a distant planet by aliens as an ambassador from Earth, likely never to return to Earth in your lifetime. The government gives you access to any one tech toy you've ever owned, (including things they're supposedly no longer making), and the aliens will provide you with an unlimited power supply for it. Your goal is to take something with you that will both remind you of home, and suitably impress the natives. (Think Lennier and the Kawasaki Ninja.) What do you take? Why?
Limiting this to something I've previously owned narrows the field down significantly. Also the fact that I'd be getting sent to another world means I'd be hanging out with a species with far greater tech than I currently have access to. This will make 'impressing the natives' hard. Some of my obvious answers like "a damn good digital camera to store my travels on" would be something that I could most likely acquire once there... and theirs would probably have far better capabilities. I still might pick that, though... as I could bring a ton of photo-memories with me in addition to being able to take new ones.
Most likely it'd be a laptop with a huge bundle of high-density media for it containing archives of everything from Earth. A HHGTTG of sorts, stored on a stack of DVD's that the laptop can play. I'd use it to teach them about ol' Terra and its inhabitants as well as have it as something to remember. And, even though they'd probably have far better -- the specific way in which we've done semiconductor technology and storage might prove to be novel or strange enough to 'impress the natives'.
2>If you could 'do over' one bad thing in your life, knowing that you would erase several connected events (and possibly the knowing of certain people) as a result, what would you regret losing? [Note that I am not asking you what it is you would do over here; I'm asking 'what do you give up by fixing a mistake?']
What would I regret losing, or what would I be willing to lose to 'fix a mistake'? Hard to tell exactly what you're asking here. If the question was the former -- well, say that I fixed the family mistake of us moving from California to Missouri so my dad could be a farm-kid again. This would have probably had a huge influence on myself and my sisters, and I would have spent my gradeschool years continuing in the advanced classes and such, near the technology hubs I eventually returned to. I may not have put on the weight; my life could have taken a whole different path that might have been for the better. Who's to say? But... then I would miss the intensely important memories of growing up on a farm, surrounded by extended family. Even though I've not seen most of them since we left there in 1982, I treasure the time spent with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and all the other family-freinds. Those are some of the coolest memories of my life.
If the question was the latter... what would I be willing to lose? Hmmmm. I hope this doesn't sound too petty... but I'd be willing to lose a good bit. I had to give up a lot each time I moved during my youth: friends, teachers, things, hidden lairs... you name it. I kind of got used to that and started craving the adventure of new things instead. Fixing a mistake and re-forking the life into a new path is just fourth-dimentional road to a new adventure. Life goes on, and it'd be time to find a new and refreshing path, even though things were lost. My only true worries are that now that I'm older and heavier it'd be harder for me to meet/make new friends than it was when I was younger and more athletic.
3>Your journal has become a travelogue of sorts, in a large way.
What's the place you remember the most fondly, and why haven't you been back there lately?
I touched on this in the last question. The best response I can give would be "places with family from my youth". This involves a lot of Missouri, and a few specific cross-country routes. I especially want to retrace one of our moves where we got snowed on in Bryce Canyon and slept under the stars in Valley of Fire State Park. A big goal of mine someday is to load up the bike, camera and laptop and retrace the line between all the houses I've lived in.... making a photo-journal along the way.
I've not been there because, well.. I'm caught in the Silicon Valley Trap, with extra bindings provided by my materialistic streak of the last decade. A long vacation to go do Serious Things requires a few things to happen at once: Money, Time Off, Health and Infrastructure. Over time I've built the infrastructure to allow me to roam the nation if I need be. There'd be more I'd do if I could afford it. Health has become a hinderance (things like my sleep apnea and dumb CPAP machine meaning I can't just do roadside tent-sleeping nearly as well, and my leg problems meaning I can't get too far on my own without having a vehicle), but at this point it's not a show-stopper. I hope to do these travels before it does become a reason I can't go. This leaves Money and Time Off, which never seem to coincide.
Right now, in fact... I have most of a month of paid vacation time just sitting there, with no grand plans other than the usual Burning Man attached to it. By the time BM rolls around I will have earned another 4 days of vacation anyways. But money? Due to bad planning, bad behavior, infrastructure building and other bits I'm at the lowest 'savings in the bank and daily cash available' levels I've been at since moving to California. Seriously. It's embarrasing, but it helps to admit it.
If somehow I get a light payoff that builds my buffer back -- even a tiny one that makes it safe to 'disappear' for a month or more -- I'm gone. Vapor-trail. Blue streak outta the door.
4>I've always wondered how my life would have been different had my parent been more insistent about me going to church.
Has being the son of a preacher influenced your personal belief system at all? (You don't have to describe what you believe in.)
My father has influenced my belief system in one important way: he encouraged me to find my own way. I'll always be thankful to him for that. He showed me the basics and practice of his belief system and had me do the normal sunday-school/sunday-service thing while growing up, but as soon as I was old enough to start questioning and doing my own thing (about 7th grade or so) the 'requirement' to go to church was downgraded to a 'recommendation'.
Sad to say, most of why I stopped going at first wasn't due to any revelation, higher purpose, or internal quest. It was because I was an errant kid who wanted to play on Sundays instead of sit still in a pew. It wasn't until late in college when I started truely asking myself what I believed and why. That internal quest is still underway, with some successes and far more questions.
As far as him ( and my mom, lest you forget) being in the priesthood? Honestly, I don't see it as much different. Short of the prayers-before-food it was nothing like 'living with a preacher for a dad' sounds like it should be. He's just a good ol' proper Dad who was a chemist in his day job (and nowadays is a city water-systems manager). Yeah, he goes to a church where everybody has a real job too. :) He's been amazingly tolerant of all kinds of things. Heck, there was once a good period of time in late high-school when he thought my best friend and I were homosexual and close... and instead of getting upset he was quietly supportive. Weirded out, sure, but supportive. That impressed the heck out of me.
To answer your question straight-up: Being the son of a very supportive, very tolerant and very real-world preacher has definately influenced my personal belief system. He's the one who taught me that it was safe, normal and healthy to seek out my own beliefs -- and that I can always go to him and his church for support on this quest if I so choose to. Regardless of the actual religion stuff, he's biased me towards following the ol' Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you). While I'm worlds away from being perfect, at least this bias makes me want to treat others in this world with a more healthy attitude whenever I can. This is a bias I wish more folks in the world had.
5>If you could only do ONE of the following omnipotent things, which would you choose, and why?
* Raise everyone's literacy to the sophmore college level.
* Give everyone a purpose that they enjoy, but don't change their situation otherwise.
* Create a self-sufficient continent/dimension that you can invite specific people to in order to give them a safe place to visit, and if they want to, live.
* Make unreasoning hatred of other people cause the person doing the hateful things to break out in an embarassing rash.
* Find someone's perfect life partner for them, wherever they are in the world. (Perfect also, by neccessity, includes them being single/available.)
Option #3, definately.
All of the others are feelgood-patches on a larger problem: our species is outgrowing its resources faster than we are learning to find/invent/create new ones. Most of the misery and suffering of this world is related to the fact that everybody, at some level, has to grab for what they want before the others popping up around them get it first. Pockets of everything-is-fine (chunks of suburban america, for instance) exist at the cost of other areas being in amazing amounts of poverty and strife.
Raising literacy is wonderful but it's not going to create any more jobs or resources for the vast scores of people who are laboring away at the bottom of the work-food-chain. Giving folks a purpose will make them happier IMHO, and reduce tensions, but it won't feed the starving or console the persecuted. Making hate fire back is just a ha-ha-got-you-back type of justice; a meta-scale version of hate all over again. Only the last option, of finding people their perfect partners, would do significant good towards lessening the world's grief -- but it won't do a thing to solve all the problems that might still destroy them and their lives as pairs and families. To be pessimistic, it would also probably add to the population problem. Happy couples often make for big happy families.
A new world/dimension/etc where everything was in balance -- where population growth matched the resource growth, and therefore exploration was based on adventure more than a need to acquire more for the species to survive... that's the start of something far greater. It may not be a utopia, but it could definately be a more solid footing for a species.
---------------
In order for this meme to continue, I must volunteer to interview another person who asks me to. So... who wants 5 questions?
traveller_blues fell prey to the interview-meme. He passed it my way by request. I put off answering until the weekend was over.1>You're going to be shipped off to a distant planet by aliens as an ambassador from Earth, likely never to return to Earth in your lifetime. The government gives you access to any one tech toy you've ever owned, (including things they're supposedly no longer making), and the aliens will provide you with an unlimited power supply for it. Your goal is to take something with you that will both remind you of home, and suitably impress the natives. (Think Lennier and the Kawasaki Ninja.) What do you take? Why?
Limiting this to something I've previously owned narrows the field down significantly. Also the fact that I'd be getting sent to another world means I'd be hanging out with a species with far greater tech than I currently have access to. This will make 'impressing the natives' hard. Some of my obvious answers like "a damn good digital camera to store my travels on" would be something that I could most likely acquire once there... and theirs would probably have far better capabilities. I still might pick that, though... as I could bring a ton of photo-memories with me in addition to being able to take new ones.
Most likely it'd be a laptop with a huge bundle of high-density media for it containing archives of everything from Earth. A HHGTTG of sorts, stored on a stack of DVD's that the laptop can play. I'd use it to teach them about ol' Terra and its inhabitants as well as have it as something to remember. And, even though they'd probably have far better -- the specific way in which we've done semiconductor technology and storage might prove to be novel or strange enough to 'impress the natives'.
2>If you could 'do over' one bad thing in your life, knowing that you would erase several connected events (and possibly the knowing of certain people) as a result, what would you regret losing? [Note that I am not asking you what it is you would do over here; I'm asking 'what do you give up by fixing a mistake?']
What would I regret losing, or what would I be willing to lose to 'fix a mistake'? Hard to tell exactly what you're asking here. If the question was the former -- well, say that I fixed the family mistake of us moving from California to Missouri so my dad could be a farm-kid again. This would have probably had a huge influence on myself and my sisters, and I would have spent my gradeschool years continuing in the advanced classes and such, near the technology hubs I eventually returned to. I may not have put on the weight; my life could have taken a whole different path that might have been for the better. Who's to say? But... then I would miss the intensely important memories of growing up on a farm, surrounded by extended family. Even though I've not seen most of them since we left there in 1982, I treasure the time spent with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and all the other family-freinds. Those are some of the coolest memories of my life.
If the question was the latter... what would I be willing to lose? Hmmmm. I hope this doesn't sound too petty... but I'd be willing to lose a good bit. I had to give up a lot each time I moved during my youth: friends, teachers, things, hidden lairs... you name it. I kind of got used to that and started craving the adventure of new things instead. Fixing a mistake and re-forking the life into a new path is just fourth-dimentional road to a new adventure. Life goes on, and it'd be time to find a new and refreshing path, even though things were lost. My only true worries are that now that I'm older and heavier it'd be harder for me to meet/make new friends than it was when I was younger and more athletic.
3>Your journal has become a travelogue of sorts, in a large way.
What's the place you remember the most fondly, and why haven't you been back there lately?
I touched on this in the last question. The best response I can give would be "places with family from my youth". This involves a lot of Missouri, and a few specific cross-country routes. I especially want to retrace one of our moves where we got snowed on in Bryce Canyon and slept under the stars in Valley of Fire State Park. A big goal of mine someday is to load up the bike, camera and laptop and retrace the line between all the houses I've lived in.... making a photo-journal along the way.
I've not been there because, well.. I'm caught in the Silicon Valley Trap, with extra bindings provided by my materialistic streak of the last decade. A long vacation to go do Serious Things requires a few things to happen at once: Money, Time Off, Health and Infrastructure. Over time I've built the infrastructure to allow me to roam the nation if I need be. There'd be more I'd do if I could afford it. Health has become a hinderance (things like my sleep apnea and dumb CPAP machine meaning I can't just do roadside tent-sleeping nearly as well, and my leg problems meaning I can't get too far on my own without having a vehicle), but at this point it's not a show-stopper. I hope to do these travels before it does become a reason I can't go. This leaves Money and Time Off, which never seem to coincide.
Right now, in fact... I have most of a month of paid vacation time just sitting there, with no grand plans other than the usual Burning Man attached to it. By the time BM rolls around I will have earned another 4 days of vacation anyways. But money? Due to bad planning, bad behavior, infrastructure building and other bits I'm at the lowest 'savings in the bank and daily cash available' levels I've been at since moving to California. Seriously. It's embarrasing, but it helps to admit it.
If somehow I get a light payoff that builds my buffer back -- even a tiny one that makes it safe to 'disappear' for a month or more -- I'm gone. Vapor-trail. Blue streak outta the door.
4>I've always wondered how my life would have been different had my parent been more insistent about me going to church.
Has being the son of a preacher influenced your personal belief system at all? (You don't have to describe what you believe in.)
My father has influenced my belief system in one important way: he encouraged me to find my own way. I'll always be thankful to him for that. He showed me the basics and practice of his belief system and had me do the normal sunday-school/sunday-service thing while growing up, but as soon as I was old enough to start questioning and doing my own thing (about 7th grade or so) the 'requirement' to go to church was downgraded to a 'recommendation'.
Sad to say, most of why I stopped going at first wasn't due to any revelation, higher purpose, or internal quest. It was because I was an errant kid who wanted to play on Sundays instead of sit still in a pew. It wasn't until late in college when I started truely asking myself what I believed and why. That internal quest is still underway, with some successes and far more questions.
As far as him ( and my mom, lest you forget) being in the priesthood? Honestly, I don't see it as much different. Short of the prayers-before-food it was nothing like 'living with a preacher for a dad' sounds like it should be. He's just a good ol' proper Dad who was a chemist in his day job (and nowadays is a city water-systems manager). Yeah, he goes to a church where everybody has a real job too. :) He's been amazingly tolerant of all kinds of things. Heck, there was once a good period of time in late high-school when he thought my best friend and I were homosexual and close... and instead of getting upset he was quietly supportive. Weirded out, sure, but supportive. That impressed the heck out of me.
To answer your question straight-up: Being the son of a very supportive, very tolerant and very real-world preacher has definately influenced my personal belief system. He's the one who taught me that it was safe, normal and healthy to seek out my own beliefs -- and that I can always go to him and his church for support on this quest if I so choose to. Regardless of the actual religion stuff, he's biased me towards following the ol' Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you). While I'm worlds away from being perfect, at least this bias makes me want to treat others in this world with a more healthy attitude whenever I can. This is a bias I wish more folks in the world had.
5>If you could only do ONE of the following omnipotent things, which would you choose, and why?
* Raise everyone's literacy to the sophmore college level.
* Give everyone a purpose that they enjoy, but don't change their situation otherwise.
* Create a self-sufficient continent/dimension that you can invite specific people to in order to give them a safe place to visit, and if they want to, live.
* Make unreasoning hatred of other people cause the person doing the hateful things to break out in an embarassing rash.
* Find someone's perfect life partner for them, wherever they are in the world. (Perfect also, by neccessity, includes them being single/available.)
Option #3, definately.
All of the others are feelgood-patches on a larger problem: our species is outgrowing its resources faster than we are learning to find/invent/create new ones. Most of the misery and suffering of this world is related to the fact that everybody, at some level, has to grab for what they want before the others popping up around them get it first. Pockets of everything-is-fine (chunks of suburban america, for instance) exist at the cost of other areas being in amazing amounts of poverty and strife.
Raising literacy is wonderful but it's not going to create any more jobs or resources for the vast scores of people who are laboring away at the bottom of the work-food-chain. Giving folks a purpose will make them happier IMHO, and reduce tensions, but it won't feed the starving or console the persecuted. Making hate fire back is just a ha-ha-got-you-back type of justice; a meta-scale version of hate all over again. Only the last option, of finding people their perfect partners, would do significant good towards lessening the world's grief -- but it won't do a thing to solve all the problems that might still destroy them and their lives as pairs and families. To be pessimistic, it would also probably add to the population problem. Happy couples often make for big happy families.
A new world/dimension/etc where everything was in balance -- where population growth matched the resource growth, and therefore exploration was based on adventure more than a need to acquire more for the species to survive... that's the start of something far greater. It may not be a utopia, but it could definately be a more solid footing for a species.
---------------
In order for this meme to continue, I must volunteer to interview another person who asks me to. So... who wants 5 questions?
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Re: Perfect and imperfect worlds.
Date: 2003-06-13 01:32 pm (UTC)Myself -- I'd go with giving people a purpose -- because I know more people who are 'lost' than people who need love, money, or a safe place.
-Traveller.